ASU’s Humanities Institute announces 2025–26 fellows
The Humanities Institute at Arizona State University has announced six faculty members as recipients of the 2025-2026 fellowship.
Ron Broglio, the director of the Humanities Institute, says, “The most important commodity for scholars is time. The fellowship program gives faculty the time to think and write. The fellowship also provides community through their cohort meetings where they read each other’s work and learn about resources here at ASU.”
In 2023, Tyler Peterson, an assistant professor in the Department of English, was awarded a fellowship for his book project “A Grammar of 'Onk Akimel O'odham,” a language revitalization effort which describes the grammatical structure of the O'odham language. Since, Tyler has been able to secure significant external funding, including a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to preserve Tamayama, an endangered language spoken in central New Mexico.
“I am consistently impressed by the work of my colleagues,” Broglio says. “Humanities Institute Fellows are advancing humanities thinking in a wide range of fields and display the best of what the humanities at ASU can do.”
The 2025-2026 Humanities Institute Fellows are:
Evan Berry, associate professor of environmental humanities in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
Evan Berry’s book project on “fossil fueled religion” explores granular, theoretically rich stories about the cultural implications of fossil fuel extractivism, focusing on the religious characteristics of hydrocarbon-dependent societies.
Peter Joseph Torres, assistant professor in the Department of English
Peter Joseph Torres’ book “Narcolinguistics and the Opioid Epidemic: Language, Power, and Human Experience in a Time of Crisis” reveals how words — in policies, patient narratives, and physician responses — create meaning and shape medical outcomes.
Linh Vu, associate professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
Linh Vu’s scholarly monograph, “Republic of Virtues: Honors and Awards in Modern China and Taiwan,” examines how the civilian award system shaped China’s transformation from empire to nation in the 1910s, state-building from the 1920s to the 1940s, and postwar reconstruction from the 1950s to the 1970s, contributing to our understanding of human motivations.
Jed Samer, associate professor in the Department of English’s film and media studies program
Jed Samer’s project, “The Transgender Joke Book,” offers the first comprehensive study of the rise of transgender comedy, exploring the growing visibility of trans comedians and imploring audiences to let go of ideological frameworks meant to contain trans life.
Mónica Espaillat Lizardo, assistant professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
Mónica Espaillat Lizardo’s work, “‘The Most Perfect Identification Document’: Codifying the Twentieth Century Dominican Citizen,” presents the first historical analysis of the cédula (citizen ID), the cornerstone of modern Dominican citizenship, and explores how fluctuating categories on the cédula were used in service of an anti-Haitian and heteropatriarchal vision of citizenship.
Rachel Corbman, assistant professor in the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies
Rachel Corban’s book “Before Crip Theory: A History of Lesbian Feminist Disability Activism” tells the previously untold story of a small network of disability activists in the lesbian feminist movement and positions lesbian feminist disability activism as a necessary precursor for work on the intersection of queer and disability studies today.
To learn more about the Humanities Institute and the fellows program, visit https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/grants-awards/fellows